THE SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
June 26, 2005
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
The Rev. M. Anthony Seel, Jr.
Matthew 6:12
"Confession of our Sin"
Hazel Motes was ten when he talked his way into a carnival sideshow tent and saw a naked woman slithering around “in a box lined with black cloth.” He felt embarrassment and shame, and when his mother later asked him “What you seen?” he didn’t answer. She asked him again, and again he didn’t answer. Flannery O’Connor, in her novel Wise Blood describes the rest of the scene in this way:
She hit him across the legs with a stick, but he was like part of the
tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said.
“I never ast him,” he muttered.
She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed,
and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that
was in him.
The next day, Hazel Motes filled the bottoms of his shoes with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He wore them on a mile walk through the woods, thinking to do so would assuage his guilt, but it didn’t. Hazel Motes, whose father and grandfather were tent preachers in the South, doesn’t believe in Jesus or sin, or any need for confession or repentance. Yet the central problem of his life is that he never learned how to properly deal with his guilt.
Our focus this morning from the Lord’s Prayer is located in Matthew 6, verse 12. In teaching His followers how to pray, Jesus continues in the Lord’s Prayer, saying,
"and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."
As our booklet tells us,
In the parallel passage of Luke 11:4 the word sins is used to replace
the word "debts." Our offenses against God are to be considered a
debt that is owed. The trouble is that we have no way to pay our
sin debt. That is why we are totally dependent on the forgiveness
of God. [p. 23]
Our debt to God is the price of our sins, and it is God’s free gift to pay the price for our sins on the cross and offer us forgiveness.
Anglican priest and writer Kenneth Leech reminds us about the high price of our sins when he says,
To be in a state of sin is to be separated - from God, from others
and from oneself. Through sin the face of God is obscured…. And
this sin is all pervasive. [True Prayer, p. 126]
Martin Luther helps us to understand the gravity of not recognizing sin in our lives, saying, "Ignorance of sin of necessity brings in its train ignorance of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, and of all things" {quoted in Leach, p. 127]. As Luther so strongly suggests, sin clouds our understanding of everything.
In the words of theologian L. Gregory Jones,
The "deepest truth" about ourselves is neither that we are self-
sufficient nor that [we] are weak, needy and fallible; it is that
are created for communion with God, with one another, and
with the whole Creation. We need God and others both to
discover who and whose we are and also because it is only
through our life together that we can fulfill our destiny for
communion in God’s Kingdom.
Yet human beings have persistently rejected and continue to
reject that communion. [Embodying Forgiveness, p. 61]
This is our sin. We reject the communion with God that God offers us because we do not love God with our whole heart, strength and mind. We reject the communion that we can share with others because we do not love our neighbor as ourselves. Furthermore, we are often reluctant to acknowledge and deal with the sin in us that separates us from God, others and ourselves.
The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that confession of sin needs to be one of the central elements of our prayers. To this end, we look at the phrase in verse 12 of Matthew, chapter 6:
"and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."
According to our series booklet, three truths are embedded in Matthew 6:12
1. The first is that we must make daily confession of our sins to God.
Something interesting was uttered in the presidential proclamation for the second National Day of Prayer, and it hasn’t been said since. In 1953, in his National Day of Prayer proclamation, President Eisenhower used the word "sin." Psychiatrist Karl Menninger reports that Eisenhower "borrowed the words for his proclamation from a call issued in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln" (Whatever Happened to Sin? p. 17]. In his 1953 proclamation, Eisenhower said,
It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence
upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and
transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine
repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.
The problem of sin and evil is so abundantly obvious, but it is too often not even mentioned. It resides in individuals before it resides in societies or nations, but societies and nations are only as good as those who lead them.
Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas instruct us thus,
Christians must learn that the world, in spite of God’s good creation,
is also in fundamental rebellion… The revolt reaches to every aspect
of our existence, since through humanity’s sin all of creation has been
thrown out of joint… The Christian story trains us to see that in most
of our life we act as if this is not God’s world and therein lies our
fundamental sin. [The Peaceable Kingdom, p. 30]
This is our human condition and the only escape from our sinful nature is in Jesus Christ.
And so, it is important for us that we keep short accounts with God. It is important that we be confessing our sins and turning from them on a regular basis. Our booklet calls for a daily confession of sins. Other authorities suggest an even more frequent pattern of confession. As Dallas Willard of the University of Southern California writes,
We must accept the fact that unconfessed sin is a special kind of
burden or obstruction in the psychological as well as the physical
realities of the believers life. [The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 188]
Our souls and bodies cannot be in a state of health when we are harboring sin. Unconfessed sin burdens our hearts, damages our relationships with others, and our ability to pray. It is the prayer of confession that unburdens our hearts and frees us from the obstruction that our sins put before us as we attempt to live healthy lives.
This leads us to the second truth about confessing our sins.
2. The second truth is that God is willing to forgive our sins when we confess and forsake them.
Proverbs tells us that “No one who conceals transgressions will prosper, but one who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy” (28:13). 1 John 1:9 says that "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
Through the confession of our sins, God cleanses us. Confession not only unburdens our hearts, it also helps us to avoid sin in the future. God’s cleansing work within us changes our sinful nature to a more healthy one that seeks righteousness. God’s cleansing work in us restores our communion with God and with others. This is the power that confession releases as God’s forgiveness is bestowed upon those who are truly penitent.
The third truth is that the key to our own forgiveness is dependent of our willingness to forgive those who sin against us. We cannot withhold forgiveness from others and expect God to forgive our sins.
Have you ever heard someone say that they will never forgive someone else? I have. It is a sad state of affairs when someone withholds forgiveness for someone else. In such a case, Jesus makes clear that God’s forgiveness is withheld from the one who will not forgive.
Let’s be clear that genuine forgiveness is neither exonerating or excusing inexcusable behavior; nor is it condoning it. Genuine forgiveness is letting go of the anger that we feel toward another person and their wrongdoing. It is an act of caring for someone else, even if that other person has not yet seen the error of their ways. The aim of forgiveness is reconciliation, and this gets us back to Jesus’ words in the Lord’s Prayer.
Jesus is saying that we cannot be reconciled to God if we are not reconciled to others. According to Jesus, God’s forgiveness of us contingent upon our forgiveness of others. As Robert C. Roberts of Baylor University points out, “anger is judgemental” (Taking the Word to Heart, p. 198). As long as we harbor anger toward others in our heart, we cannot receive the forgiveness of God. Forgiveness is “displacing anger with love” (ibid., p. 199). Forgiveness helps us to love our neighbor as ourselves, even when our neighbor is in the wrong.
About a decade or so ago, Roman Catholic mystic Marija Pavlovic had a vision that she describes in this way;
Once during prayer, I saw a flower, as in a picture, three times. The
first time it was beautiful, fresh, full of color. I rejoiced. Then I saw
the flower closed and withered. It had lost its beauty. I was sad.
Then I saw a drop of water fall on the withered flower and it opened.
I recognized it again in its first freshness and beauty. I tried to
understand the picture and what it meant for me, but I could not.
Marija Pavlovic continued to pray, and finally an interpretation of the vision came to her.
"Your heart is like a flower. Every heart is gorgeous, full of beauty.
But when sin comes, the heart withers, its beauty disappears. That
little drop you saw on the flower and rejuvenate it is a sign of
confession. When you are in sin, you cannot help yourself, but
need help from outside. [Slavko Barbaric, Give Me Your Wounded
Heart, pp. 1-2]
God is ready to help our needy hearts. His Spirit is ready to rejuvenate our penitent souls. Before this rejuvenation can occur, we need to recognize that our offenses against God and others are real and costly. . They are so costly that the Son of God endured the agony of the cross to pay the price for them. Forgiveness is expensive, and grace is not cheap.
And so, when we pray, "and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors," or in the version we are more likely to pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” we are praying that our hearts will be yielded to God and to others through the power of forgiveness.
Remember Hazel Motes? Toward the end of Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor lets us in on a little scene with Motes’ landlady. O’Connor writes,
She was cleaning his room and happened to knock over his extra
pair of shoes. She picked them up and looked into them as if she
thought she might find something hidden there. The bottoms of
them were lined with gravel and broken glass and pieces of small
stone. She spilled this out and sifted it through her fingers,
looking for a glitter that might mean something valuable, but she
saw that what she had in her hand was trash that anybody could
pick up in the alley… In a few days she examined them again
and they were lined with fresh rocks. Who’s he doing this for?
she asked herself. What’s he getting out of doing it?
… “Mr. Motes,” she said that day, when he was in her kitchen
eating his dinner, “what do you walk on rocks for?”
“To pay,” he said in a harsh voice.
“Pay for what?”
It don’t make any difference for what,” he said. I’m paying.
“But what have you got to show that you’re paying for? She
persisted.
“Mind your business,” he said rudely. “You can’t see.”
[pp. 221-222]
And I can’t see either. I do know, however, that there is a better way.
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
"and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."
Let us pray.
Almighty God, our heavenly Father, send out your Holy Spirit into our hearts. Show us our sins and supply us the courage to confess them honestly. Help us to believe that you are always willing to forgive. Remove our sin and guilt and fill us with your peace. We ask for these things through Jesus, your Son, who is our Lord and Savior. Amen.
[adapted from a prayer in Joseph Champlin, Together in Peace, p. 10]
